Mitt Romney ignited a feminist revolution during the 2012 presidential debates when he said, “I went to a number of women’s groups and said: ‘Can you help us find folks?’ And they brought us whole binders full of women.”

Throw VIDA’s pie charts highlighting “gender disparity in major literary publications and book reviews” into the mix, and you’ll grasp the necessity of Out of the Binders, a two-day solution/conference at NYU of workshops and panels “on/for/by women in the literary arts and film/TV” (which is probably you if you’re reading this post), aimed “to empower women and gender non-conforming writers with tools, connections, and strategies to advance their careers” (and enhance cup size).

VIDA is launching a new roundtable discussion series on issues in writing by women on June 2nd at Housing Works Bookstore in Manhattan. The event is the first of a series that will take place every fall and winter/spring. This time, they conversation centers on how women write about other women, featuring a panel including Jill Lepore, Rebecca Mead, Salamishah Tillet, and Ruth Franklin.

But I wonder how much these problems stem not from MFA whiteness, or the MFA system, or even publishing at large, but from the very narratives we crave—white, middle-to-upper brow, predominately heteronormative.

As we’vedocumentedprettyextensivelybefore, arts organization VIDA has done a lot to expose gender inequality in the writing world with its annual count comparing female bylines to male ones in a number of publications.

We’ve writtena fairamount about this year’s VIDA numbers. We even featured an essay by Andrew Ervin, a writer who realized he was part of the problem—only 23.5% of the books he had reviewed during his career were by women.

It’s gone to show that interviewers are often more interested in a female writer’s dietary habits and marital problems than their literary processes and work. Jodi Picoult says that she has been asked how she lost weight many, many times.

This year’s VIDA stats gave us a (depressing) wide-lens view of women’s status in the writing industry, but for a (depressing) close-up perspective, read Deborah Copaken Kogan’s recent essay in The Nation about the sexism she’s encountered during her career as a photographer and writer.

We reached out to several of the worst offenders to ask where they thought they had gone wrong…but got very little in the way of responses. So we decided, instead, to reach out to the editors of the publications that actually had managed to show a relatively gender-equitable byline distribution in 2012.

VIDA, the organization that tracks the status of women in the writing world, has posted their annual count of female writers published in major literary magazines in comparison to male writers published in the same places.

Over at The Awl, Eileen Myles shares her thoughts on seeing the VIDA pie graphs. She tells us that writing by women is inherently more interesting: “Why? Because the female reality is still largely unknown. And language is the thrill that holds the unknown in its vague and shifting ways.

Before VIDA released its latest count, there was Ann Hays’ open letter to The New Yorker complaining about the dearth of women in its pages, and I remember applauding the letter while thinking the whole time that it wouldn’t matter if the conversation didn’t somehow jump into the mainstream.

“I do not believe that apparent authoritative literary voices of validation would ever make such a grand claim about a novel written by a woman. I say this because I believe there are many novels by women that are about the same sort of world as presented in Freedom. Sadly, the culture usually calls these books domestic or family sagas. Are the novels of Anne Tyler, Marilynne Robinson and Mona Simpson any less white and middle “American” than Franzen”

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